A Nonlinear Approach for Modeling and Forecasting US Business Cycles

The purpose of this paper is to provide a complete evaluation of four regime-switching models by checking their performance in detecting US business cycle turning points, in replicating US business cycle features and in forecasting US GDP growth rate. Both individual and combined forecasts are considered. Results indicate that while the Markov-switching model succeeded in replicating all the NBER peak and trough dates without an extra-cycle detection, it seems to be outperformed by the Bounce-back model in term of the delay time to a correct alarm. Concerning business cycle features characterization, none of the competing models dominates over all the features. The performance of the Markov-switching and bounce back models in detecting turning points was not translated into an improved business cycle feature characterization since they are outperformed by the Floor and Ceiling model. The forecast performance of the considered models varies across regimes and across forecast horizons. That is, the model performing best in an expansion period is not necessarily the same in a recession period and similarly for the forecast horizons. Finally, combining such individual forecasts generally leads to increased forecast accuracy especially for h=1.     

Consumer Ethnocentrism and Country-of-Origin Effects in the Moroccan Market

ABSTRACT

Differences in consumer values exert a powerful impact on product acceptance. Morocco is no stranger to this phenomenon. While this country's consumers have easy access to world markets, consumer ethnocentrism can restrict choice. The objective of this research has been to investigate ethnocentric behavior of Moroccan consumers and the extent to which domestic products might be preferred to foreign products or vice versa. Data were collected via face-to-face interviews with 400 consumers in four major Moroccan cities. A questionnaire was developed for this purpose using a version of the Consumer Ethnocentrism Scale (CETSCALE). Opinions about four products were solicited. The four products were jeans, cars, shampoo, and juice. The interviewees were asked their opinions about product attributes and about various countries-of-origin. Their responses were analyzed also on the basis of their most essential demographic characteristics. Logistic regression models were developed to analyze the data.     

RPMInter-work: a multi-agent approach for planning the task-role assignments in inter-organisational workflow

ABSTRACT

Workflow management is a core component of modern Enterprise Information Systems (EISs) infrastructure that automates the execution of critical business processes. One of the particular interests of the security community is how to ensure the completion of the workflow execution in the presence of authorisation constraints. These constraints present some restrictions on the users or the roles that are authorised to execute the workflow tasks. The goal is to enforce the legal assignments of access privileges to the executors of the workflow tasks. Despite the variety of approaches proposed in this context, an approach dedicated to the inter-organisational workflows is still missing. In this paper, we take a step towards this goal by proposing a multi-agent-based model, named RPMInter-Work (task-Role assignment Planning Model for Inter-organisational Workflow). Our approach aims to perform the planning of the task-role assignments in inter-organisational workflow in presence of authorisation constraints that are related to task-role assignments. In our research work, this planning problem is formulated as a DisCSP (Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem). Our proposed contribution is based on the requirements of inter-organisational workflows, in particular, the autonomy of the participating organisations and the respect of their privacy. A prototype of RPMInter-Work is implemented using JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment) platform and some evaluation results of this prototype are exposed in this paper.     

Becoming a green entrepreneur: An advanced entrepreneurial cognition model based on a practiced-based approach

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This paper examines how entrepreneurs develop the intention to make their venture green, even when “being green” doesn’t...